Waiting for the call

It’s late, and I should be in bed getting some sleep. But I have an idea to share, and so that’s what I’ll do instead. There’s always coffee in the morning.

I wrote a while ago that Johnny Damon would make sense for the Cubs, since they currently don’t have any veteran leaders who have won the World Series before. But for some reason, nobody has made Damon an offer for this season, and now he and some other big names–Vlad Guerrero, Ivan Rodriguez, and Magglio Ordonez, to name a few–are on the outside looking in. Spring training camps are underway, exhibition games begin this weekend, but for these guys, they’re probably a bit on edge at the moment. And I can’t fault them for that.

The card above was printed for the 1994 season, and it plainly says on the back that George Bell was cut from the White Sox after 1993. So rather than not creating a George Bell card, since he was still only 33 at the time, the Score company decided to put him in their set as a White Sox player, and let the signing by another team sort itself out before opening day. But his phone never rang, and thus George Bell never played in the big leagues again. This is a pretty good-looking card, but I’m sure Bell would have traded it in for a chance to keep playing. However, this wasn’t meant to be.

I hope that Damon and a few others can catch on somewhere before the season starts. But the waiting must indeed be a hard thing for them right now.